Archive material plays a central role within the work of artists Vicki Bennett and susan pui san lok, who both present film installations as part of the group exhibition Hit The Ground exhibition at the Hatton Gallery as part of this year’s Great North Run Cultural Programme.
Rebecca Shatwell, Director of AV Festival, will chair this talk at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle with Vicki and susan as they discuss their latest works. Come along to find out more about how they have engaged with visual archives as part of their practices and receive a complimentary glass of wine.
This event also marks the launch of a new publication celebrating lok’s work Faster, Higher, published by Film and Video Umbrella, which features extensive visual documentation of this major multi-screen installation, alongside specially commissioned essays from critics Adrian Rifkin and Chris Berry.
People Like Us have been working on a brand new live set entitled “Genre:Collage”, which will be given a world premiere at Vancouver New Music Festival 2009. Other dates are being lines up for Genre:Collage in these coming weeks, including WFMU Record Fair in October (which will be free once in the fair), BFI Southbank in London, and also Linz, Austria – both in December 2009.
VANCOUVER NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL 2009
COPYRIGHT/COPYLEFT
A festival of sonic collagism, and the art of sampled and repurposed sounds and images.
21 – 24 October 2009
Show starts 8pm each night
Free Artist Chats at 7pm each night
Negative Landscapes: free symposium on 24 October 2009, 2:30pm
Scotiabank Dance Centre
677 Davie Street
Tickets $20 regular, $15 students/seniors each night; available at Zulu Records (1972 West 4th Avenue), Scratch Records (726 Richards Street), through Tickets Tonight (www.ticketstonight.ca; 604.684.2787; surcharges apply) and at the door.
Passes for all four nights $60 and $40, available only through Vancouver New Music (604.633.0861) and at the door.
Wednesday 21 October 2009
Andrew O’Connor and Doug Horne
Jackson 2bears
John Oswald
Thursday 22 October 2009
Eric Hedekar
DJ Tapes
Chris Cutler
People Like Us
Friday 23 October 2009
Sonarchy
Holzkopf
Scanner
David Shea
Saturday 24 October 2009
Mark Hosler
Uri Caine
plus free symposium
A new large scale AV work by Vicki Bennett entitled “Parade” will be exhibited at Hit The Ground at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. There will also be two photographic montages by Vicki Bennett exhibited as part of the exhibition.
While viewing and sourcing content from the Great North Run film archive, it occurred to me that the huge crowds that come to spectate this event are as important as the participator.
I arranged film frame layers across the screen so that they strayed outwards in the direction of the natural panning of the original shots – much more in accordance with the natural gaze of the spectator, revealing a unique panoramic view of the content. The irregular angles and shifting perspectives bring to mind Cubist photomontage and Cubist/Vorticist painting/collage, with the added dimension of the moving image naturally taking this to another level.
Given that this is a celebration of human achievement, and as a nod of appreciation to the Cubist influence within this work, it seemed appropriate to use “Parade” by Erik Satie as the musical backdrop.
Parade has been screened at: March 2011 – Ambulante Festival, Mexico July-Oct 2010 – In The Long Run: 30 Years of Great Running – Great North Museum: Hancock, UK September–November 2009 – Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK Hatton Gallery 16 September – 14 November 2009, 10am – 5pm (Sun 2pm – 5pm)
The Hatton Gallery is based within the grounds of Newcastle University. The nearest Metro station is Haymarket. The Hatton Gallery, The Quadrangle, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne. NE1 1RU Telephone 0191 222 6059 Click here for a map of the Hatton Gallery. Part of The Bupa Great North Run Cultural Programme.
Background on the project – commission announcement from 2008:
To celebrate the silver anniversary of the BUPA Great North Run in 2005, the Great North Run Cultural Programme was established, which featured the film broken time by Jane and Louise Wilson. As part of the legacy of this film and part of an ongoing commitment to exploring the relationship between sport and art through, an annual award – Great North Run Moving Image Commission – was born.
Supported by Arts Council England, this major commission awards an experienced artist or film-maker £30,000 to create a new work which responds to and captures the spirit of one of the world’s top sporting events and we’re delighted to be able to announce the winner of Moving Image Commission for 2009 is British Artist Vicki Bennett. Vicki will be working with archive footage of the Bupa Great North Run to create a new vision of the landscape and the route of the world’s largest half-marathon to be screened as part of the 2009 Bupa Great North Run Cultural Programme.
Track listing:
A: Part One – 17m12s
B: Part Two – 15m07s
Jean Baudrillard’s “Le Xerox et l’Infini” – originally published in Paris, 1987 – as read by Patricia and Ellen. Recorded on 12 July 2009 by Vicki Bennett in Hersham, England. Translation: Agitac, London, November 1988.
“Jean Baudrillard is perhaps the most important theorist of the ‘after modern’. Though he says himself he has ‘nothing to do with postmodernism’, many interpret him (along with Jean-François Lyotard) as among the most important prophets of a truly postmodern era. His works have attracted high praise and derision all over the world.”
Patricia and Ellen were born in Reims, north-eastern France, on July 29, 1929. They told interviewers that their grandparents were peasants and their parents were civil servants. They became the first of their family to attend university when they moved to the Sorbonne in Paris. There they studied German, which led to them to begin teaching the subject at a provincial lycée, where they remained from 1958 until their departure in 1966. While teaching Patricia and Ellen began to publish reviews of literature, and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht and Wilhelm Mühlmann.
Later on, with the development of the magnetic tape recorder, Patricia and Ellen used these new means in order to manipulate their performances and expand the possibilities of language sound transformations. Patricia and Ellen continue to actively perform their work, the contextual quality of which is enhanced by their idiosyncratic delivery.
All Avant-Garde All The Time – UbuWeb Podcast #9: The Sounds of the UK from the 1960s To Yesterday Listen / Download
Produced by The Poetry Foundation, UbuWeb is pleased to announce the latest in its podcast series, focusing on a dozen of Ubu’s hidden treasures, highlighting audio works that you really should know about about but most likely don’t. With this podcast, we continue our series focusing on the sounds of different regions. Here the focus is on the avant-garde language-based audio coming out of the UK. Beginning with Bob Cobbing and making our way through the the swinging London scene of the 60s, and the political / punk work of the 70s, and ending up with the electronics + samples of today, we cut a path through the London (and beyond) underground. Featured here are works by Bob Cobbing, Neil Mills, Lily Greenham, Cornelius Cardew, Christopher Logue, Richard Long, Art & Language + The Red Krayloa, Furious Pig, Momus, People Like Us, and Caroline Bergvall.
We really recommend subscribing to this excellent podcast. Find out more about each episode here.Subscribe here.
People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz will be playing a joint set at Cafe Oto in Dalston, London on Saturday 1st August.
Doors open 8pm, Tickets £7 – which we recommend you buy in advance now since Cafe Oto is popular!
Cafe Oto site programme/tickets
The live performance will combine material from the last four People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz releases. Vicki & Ergo perform a set that crosses sampling with the English nonsense tradition, traditional composition with electronic music, and contemporary approaches to sound with melodic and textural fragments of orchestral music. The sound of the two artists collaborating has often been compared to circus or carnival music, and stands as a separate and distinct entity to the two artists individual work. It is perhaps best described as “woozy dream circus”.
There will be two 25 minute sets preceded by a number of short films by the artists, starting shortly after 8pm.
We are very pleased to announce that the recently deleted “Rhapsody in Glue” digital album by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz from 2008 is now available for the first time for free download!
Following the success of the critically acclaimed “Perpetuum Mobile” CD of 2007, renowned UK collagists / composers People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz reunite for “Rhapsody in Glue”, a cycle of bricolage-ballet-music, skewed-waltzes, and skewiff-pop.
There is a story behind every album, and with “Rhapsody in Glue” we find a unique approach to constructing a record. Both long-term contributors to New York radio station WFMU, People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz decided to publicly tear apart their respective practices and create an album “in the open”, presenting on a seafood-filled-platter the process of collaborative collage composition – informally discussing and jabbering nonsense to one another, resulting in the “Codpaste” free podcast series (which we have also recently made available as an mp3 download). “Rhapsody in Glue” is the culmination of the ideas explored in the podcast series.
“Rhapsody in Glue” continues in the bizarre ballroom vein of their previous efforts together, however, increasing the sonic palette into textural depths previously uncharted in their work. If “Carmic Waltz” is an expressionist painting by aged ballroom dance teacher who’s eaten the wrong kind of mushrooms in her soufflé, then “Gary’s Anatomy” is a slice of pure absurdist pop shot through with slabs of exotica and Ethel Merman. Recurring through the record is an apparent obsession with Prokofiev’s “Troika (Sleigh Ride)”, which merges and mashes with Burt Bacharach and Queen on “Snow Day”, and lapses into pure fantasy on the almost entirely acoustic “Withers in the Whist”, jarring with Ergo’s strange, Victoriana obsessed lyrics. Then on “Dancing in the Carmen” we discover what happens if Nana Mouskouri is thrown into a pot with Peggy Lee and let simmer for 10 minutes, whilst “In The Waking” shimmers along on multitracked guitars, meandering melodies, and music boxes.
Also you don’t need an mp3 player/ipod to play a podcast – all it is is an mp3 that gets delivered to your computer as soon as it’s available – how about that?
If you’d prefer to just listen to archives you can listen here in just SO many ways. We’ve even got a fancy pop up player –
